OneDrive Tips and Tricks

Welcome to the OneDrive tips and tricks page! Here you can learn some useful information on navigating, using, and storing data on OneDrive better.

Tips and Tricks

• When trying to share a file on OneDrive, keep in mind that Seattle University’s OneDrive and SharePoint environments support file sharing with people inside and outside Seattle University.

• For external sharing, anonymous sharing is disabled but authenticated sharing is enabled. This means files and folders can be shared with a specific user account, and only that account can access the shared material.  

• The OneDrive application provides access to your OneDrive files stored in the cloud. The OneDrive app can also be used to provide access to SharePoint sites that you choose to “sync” to the app (these will appear under “Seattle University” in File Explorer). 

• When you save a file in an Office 365 application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) or the OneDrive application, you see OneDrive and SharePoint options, but not Teams. To save data to a Teams site you must look for the SharePoint library with the same name as that Teams site. 

• The Outlook application behaves differently from other Office applications when saving data to the cloud.  When saving attachments, Outlook for the PC uses the operating system’s File Explorer menu.  Unless you download, install, and configure the OneDrive application to view and sync your OneDrive and selected SharePoint libraries to File Explorer, you will not see your OneDrive or SharePoint locations in Outlook. 

• After graduation, Seattle University alumni retain all email functionality. OneDrive storage is changed to read-only (new files cannot be added) and limited to 5 GB. 

• Are you creating a new document from an existing template? Remember to Save a copy first, then edit! OneDrive automatically saves changes to your documents. This means the old trick of opening an old version of a document, making changes, and then saving the changes as a new version will NOT work as you intend. You need to take those steps backwards - FIRST, save a copy as a new file, THEN make your new changes.